Texas is awesome at a number of things: organizing armed militias, extracting fossil fuels from the ground, burning meat on a grill. But, hard as it is to admit, this great state of ours isn't perfect. There are, in fact, certain areas where Texas frankly sucks, namely graduating high school students. That's according to
a map compiled by Thrillist that identifies each state's greatest weaknesses.
Texas has the
fewest high school graduates per capita, according to 2009 U.S. Census data which tabulated educational attainment levels for people over the age of 25. As Thrillist points out, our state is the only one where less than 80 percent of the population has earned a high school diploma. But, hey, at least we're not Indiana, land of the most meth accidents, although we do have
the occasional meth accident here in the Lone Star State.
It appears 2009 was the last time the U.S. Census Bureau released data on educational attainment levels by state. Last year, they released education data based on age, sex and race. In 2013, the Texas Education Agency was happy to announce that the class of 2012 saw an
all-time high graduation rate of 87.7 percent. But anyone with a high school diploma should know that correlating the TEA and Census data is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
So what do other states suck at? Missouri has the worst puppy mills. Alabama has the highest rate of child smokers, and Alaska has the highest rate of chlamydia, probably because they are all sexing up on each other to prevent hypothermia. The liberal hellscape that is New York is the worst place to be a tax payer. Vermont is tops in illicit drug use, but we were unaware that maple syrup was an illicit drug, and Washington is the worst at loving Canada's greatest export, Justin Bieber.
Browse the complete list of every state's shortcomings at
Thrillist.com.
